Use a Move/Relocation Checklist to streamline office moves

Here is a “no brainer” about our IT support role, , , our job is to keep the business ‘up and running’. That’s right, most of us in IT have a 24 X 7, 365-day job to keep our technologies running and our business clients positioned to use them.

There is an old saying that you should keep in mind:

UPTIME IS KING !!

Sooner or later you are going to have to support a company move, department relocation, or opening up a new office. The very nature of these activities suggests downtime, , , and downtime is an IT organization’s worst enemy.

A move or relocation is a project just like any other project, and one of the things you want to do is to minimize the business impact in achieving your goal of getting the affected organization and people in place so they can be productive.

I was the CIO of a company in the mid-90’s that grew from $30 million in revenue to over $600 million in just over 5 years. We accomplished much of this growth by acquiring other companies that provided the same type of physician billing services we provided. Many times we would acquire a company that had an office right around the corner from one of our offices. To leverage our investment we either consolidated the two offices into one of them or moved both offices to a brand new location.

It seemed like we were moving a group of people to a new location or opening up a new office every week.

Relocation activities create lots of opportunity for downtime and loss of productivity. Downtime was a huge cash flow and client satisfaction problem in this industry, , , if our employees could not bill and produce insurance claims and collect the money for physician services, our physician clients didn’t get paid and neither did we.

Minimizing downtime was a key objective because our success depended upon it.

A checklist can help you with almost anything that you need to do from time to time, , , things like:

Checklists like this one and others we used helped our IT organization minimize downtime and disruption to our business by completing projects reliably and consistently, , , ingredients for a positive IT support operation.